Between Friends

by Hudson, Melanie

  The most useful thing Anya has taught me is that most of the upset in my life has been caused through my own thought processes – through my own imagination. Yes, I would like to love and be loved – it’s a wonderful thing – but I should not expect that if I can just find a man he’ll be delivered with an unlimited supply of happiness. I don’t think one man can possibly provide me with everything I desire and I won’t expect Gethyn to, i.e. … laughter, DIY, sympathy, financial security, foot warmer in bed etc. Also, my partner shouldn’t expect me to be all kinds of a woman in one, either.

  And here endeth the sermon, by Agatha Braithwaite.

  Ciao, Bella. Safe trip home, lovely lady.

  From: percynmadge@yahoo.com

  To: pollyofarabia@yahoo.com

  Subject: Antarctica

  Date: 25 June

  Dear, Polly

  I’ve not been able to settle since your phone call so I got Dad to log me onto email because I needed to write to you straight away. I’ve been thinking about your application to go to Antarctica and wondering if it’s the right thing to do. I agree you need to take charge of your life and go out and grab it by the tail, but do you realise you’d be jumping from a sandy desert to an icy one. Are you deliberately placing yourself outside normal life – normal society – as a means of running away. I can understand this, but what happens after Antarctica? Will you move on to the jungle, or the outback, or Alaska? You say you’ve found peace, but have you if you’re still running?

  With love, Mum x

  From: aggieb@yahoo.com

  To: pollyofarabia@yahoo.com

  Subject: Deliriously Happy!

  Date: 27 June

  Hi, Polly

  Oh my God! Gethyn arrived yesterday and I’ve just had THE BEST twenty-four hours of my life.

  But oh, the best bit is the story of how he travelled to Appledart. He walked (yes, walked) across the Appledart mountains (twenty miles of hard-walking in horrendous weather) to get to me because the boat doesn’t run on a Saturday. He’d joked that he’d find a way to get to me as soon as he could, but I never for one second thought he would walk here. When he stepped through the door of the café - wet through and a bit out of breath, with his paunch popping out of the lower buttons of his shirt and the rain shining off his head - I was sat at a table in front of the fire playing cards with Anya. When I turned around and looked at the person who had dropped his rucksack on the floor I knew it was him. I tried to learn from Isabella and be as cool with Gethyn as she was with Nathan, but of course, I could never be that cool. I rushed over to him and tried to speak but turned into a tongue tied, blithering fool. Gethyn took my hands in his and bid me to be quiet a moment and said, ‘I’ve walked a long way but I’m hoping this is the end of the road, and if you’re Agatha Braithwaite, I’m sure it will be.’

  Oh, my Jesus Christ – how romantic was that!

  Gethyn said it was you who persuaded him it was the right move to come and visit - thank you, thank you, thank you, my sweet, amazing friend! And don’t worry your head about anything at all, because I’m absolutely certain that your life is going to have a miraculous change of direction any moment, I just feel it in my bones.

  Love, Ag

  P.S. I may have invited Gethyn back to my place after all … Agatha Braithwaite, you’re such a devil!

  From: pollyofarabia@yahoo.com

  To: aggieb@yahoo.com

  Subject: Re: Deliriously Happy!

  Date: 27 June

  Hi, Ag

  That’s wonderful news. I’m so pleased for you both. Send Gethyn my love. Have a fabulous time. See you very soon.

  Love, Polly

  From: aggieb@yahoo.com

  To: sexymamma@yahoo.com

  Subject: Re: Hello Darling

  Date: 27 June

  Hello, Mamma

  It was lovely to hear from you. Everything is good at my end but I’m keeping a low profile with the press and I strongly suggest you do the same. I’d love for you to visit, but I wonder if we could keep my location a secret. Like you used to say, Mamma, it’s just me and you in this life together and no one else needs to be involved.

  Let me know when you want to come and I’ll book your tickets. I could fly you to Inverness and have you picked up in a car? Would you like that?

  Love you, Agatha x

  Bluey

  From: Polly

  To: Mrs Day

  Date: 28 June

  Hi, Mum

  I wanted to write a letter just to you before I leave to say thank you so much for everything while I’ve been away. The packages, the letters … everything. I stood on the banks of the Euphrates today. It was amazing - a lush oasis of hope in the middle of an arid hellhole. The Euphrates is very special, spiritual almost. I brought Angelica’s tiny knitted hat to Iraq in my rucksack, the one she wore in intensive care, just after she was born. I’m going to take it to the river tomorrow and let it flow away.

  Love you, Mum.

  Your, Pollyanna xx

  From: fletch71@yahoo.com

  To: pollyofarabia@yahoo.com

  Subject: Appledart

  Date: 28 June

  Hi, Polly

  I’m sorry my last email was abrupt.

  Guess where I am? You never will. I’m in Appledart. Is that spontaneous enough for you? I’m writing to you from your friend Agatha’s laptop. I hope you don’t mind but I’ve been chatting to her and your friend Gethyn for a few hours and they seem to have set me straight.

  After I looked in your chest of special things for the lamp I felt so confused. Then I got your letter and my head went into meltdown. I decided to bring my holiday forward a week, put on my walking boots, packed a bag, jumped in the car, went to your dad’s to drop off his tools, felt even more confused, then hit the road with the express purpose of getting away from everything – especially from mobile phones, email and from the bloody media pushing out images of Iraq all the damn time. When I left your mum’s house I checked into a hotel, logged onto a computer and emailed you my first response. Ten minutes later I knew I’d made a mistake, but didn’t know what to do. So I carried on travelling north, not entirely sure where I was headed and bounced from one hotel to another. And then I got an email from your friend, Agatha, inviting me to Appledart, and before I knew it, I was here.

  Agatha has been fantastic, and in talking to her, I finally let go of all my pent up emotion and the long and short of it is this: all I know is life is shit without you and I’ve changed my mind. So yes, I agree, if you’ll have me, let’s try again. I don’t know why I sent that bloody letter saying no. I was an arse. Come home to Dartmoor. I’ve called off the exchange of contracts on the cottage, it’s ours and no one else’s and I promise I’ll be more spontaneous in future and I’ll work less. I love you and I have only one thing to say, because it’s never too late ... Pollyanna Fletcher, will you marry me? Phone as soon as you can with your answer.

  Love, Josh x

  From: pollyofarabia@yahoo.com

  To: gethynofarabia@yahoo.com

  Subject: Thank You

  Date: 28 June

  Hi, Gethyn

  I’m just about to head into the city, but I wanted to send you a quick message to you to say what I failed to say on your last night in Basra – thank you.

  You and I will always know what we’ve seen and what we’ve done, but I don’t know that I’ll ever want to talk about it. So I don’t want to let the moment pass without making sure you know that the day you walked into the HQ tent and smiled that fabulous smile was one of the most blessed moments of my life. I will never forget dancing in the desert. Thank you a thousand times over, my wonderful friend. I surely would have been lost in hell without you.

  Love, Polly

  P.S. I hid the little ornament of Big Ben that came with Aggie’s hamper in your Bergen before you left – it’s to remind you of our time together (the good bits).

  From: aggieb@yahoo.com

  To: pollyofarabia@yahoo.com
<
br />   Subject: My First Chapter!

  Date: 28 June

  Hi, Polly

  I know I’m going to see you soon but I had to write and tell you that I’ve completed chapter one of my new novel. I know, halle-bloody-luiah! Of all the books I have written in the past, and of all the books I’ll write in the future, this one is going to be the most special to me, after all, it’s inspired by my new home and by the people and magnificent landscape that surround it. But more importantly, in writing this novel, I carry with me aspects of your story, too, and our renewed friendship, and that is something very special to me indeed.

  And so thank you, my wonderful friend, for allowing me to tell your story, albeit weaved into my own. I promise to take the very best of care of it. I’m wetting myself with excitement about writing the final chapter, which is going to be so blooming heart-warming, there will not be a dry eye in the house. Just imagine the scene: two old friends meet up for the first time on an achingly beautiful Scottish beach, one having just come back from a war zone in the desert, the other having found purpose to her life, after years of being lost in a desert of her own. We lost many years of friendship, you and I, but once you get home, I’m determined we will never lose touch again. Anyway, enough mush. Here’s the blurb for the book. Let me know what you think:

  Between Friends

  By

  Agatha Braithwaite

  Blurb

  It all began - as perhaps all such romantic stories should – with a miserable heroine, a crazy idea and an epic train journey. Such was the case for Stella Valentine, a beautiful but lonely romance writer who, on a dank December afternoon, decided on a whim to escape to the wilds of the Scottish Highlands, having lobbed her laptop and latest manuscript into the nearest river first. As anyone who has embarked on a bugger-it, life-changing journey will confess, at the outset it is impossible to know if the new path will lead to the much-longed-for ‘happy ever after’ or if it will simply prove to be yet another crappy, pot-holed road leading to even deeper depths of despair.

  But as Stella glanced whimsically out of the window of the old steam train as it powered its way down the glen, any last minute reservations were forced to the back of her mind: she didn’t notice the driving wind and rain, but felt her heart lifted – yes, physically lifted - by the deep dark lochs, towering mountains and faded heather moorlands; a landscape surely designed for the swaddling of the lost and lonely. And as she stepped onto the platform at Mallaig station, she had the definite notion – or the ‘ken’ as her new Scottish friends would say - that the next six months would prove to be the most pivotal of her life.

  What Stella did not know, however, was that at the very same moment she stepped off the train and walked across the platform, dragging her case behind her and smiling into the rain, her childhood friend, Polly Fletcher, was not only thinking of her but had, quite coincidentally and on the very same day, embarked on an epic journey of her own, but to a significantly more dangerous corner of the globe.

  This is not just Stella’s story, then, but a story of rekindled friendship, and of two women who find that every single day somehow has to matter, and that nothing in life is so bad or so utterly unfathomable, when shared between friends …

  With all the love in the world,

  Aggie (AKA Stella Valentine – I told you I’d find a use for the name)

  West Yorkshire Herald Headline

  Date: 30 June 2003

  Huddersfield Woman Killed in Basra

  A Royal Naval Reserve Officer was gunned down in Basra yesterday, next to the River Euphrates, in an ambush that left two service personnel dead and two in a critical condition. Pollyanna Fletcher, a thirty-four year old Meteorological Forecaster, originally from Midhope, West Yorkshire …

  Epilogue

  Bluey

  From: Polly

  To: Aggie

  Dated: 29 June

  Read: 3 July

  Hi, Aggie

  The internet has crashed and won’t be up and running again for a couple of days so I thought I’d return to the good old Bluey system for my last letter to you before I go home - home! Thank God. I wanted to write to give my blessing for the book, but more of that in a minute, because I especially wanted to write to say thank you for inviting Josh to Appledart (I take it you got hold of him through Dad?). You’re an incredible woman, Aggie, really, you are.

  It’s strange, isn’t it, how things work out. I’m starting to believe miracles really do happen. Take that day you bumped into Dad at the shop, what an absolute blessing that was. My nickname here has been Little Miss Sunshine. I’ve hated it. But you, Aggie, you really are full of sunshine. When I get home I’m going to see if I can radiate some sunshine of my own. For a start I’m going to see if I can help Oliver, the boy who burned down the school. And I’m also going to spend much more time with Mum and Dad, too, bless them (they must have gone through hell while I’ve been away). I’m finally going to give in and go metal detecting with Dad. He’s never given up on finding that elusive pot of gold, and if we believe strongly enough, together, maybe one day we’ll find it.

  Give my love to Gethyn. I’m so pleased you two hit it off. We finally drank that bottle of wine you sent us, it was on his last night in Basra. We sat on the roof of the airport until sunrise and savoured every last drop. We said very little to each other that night, but just sat and stared out into the desert listening to Gethyn’s music selection. The high point was when we danced across the roof, just before dawn, it was a bit daft really as someone could have taken a pop at us, but I’ll never forget it. We crossed the roof to Annie Lennox, There Must Be an Angel, and meandered back to, Both Sides Now, which I reckon has turned out to be the theme tune to my life. It was too emotional a moment to speak. Take care of him for me. I love him every bit as much as I love my real brother, and that’s a great deal indeed.

  But oh, yes, your book: I love the blurby thing, and for once, I’m delighted by your mother’s behaviour because it’s about time you wrote a novel in your own name: it’s a great name and it suits you. Speaking of names, would it be possible for you to use my real Christian name in the book? I’m proud to be Pollyanna and I think I’m living proof that a slight female with a girlie name can be a soldier (of sorts, at any rate). And oh, feel free to go crazy with the romance baloney and give me a fabulous, over-the-top, happy ending. I know Gethyn gave you some grief over this, but sod it. Mum said I was to imagine my future life in a glowing, positive way. So let’s go for full technicolour (just like when Dorothy enters Oz in the Judy Garland film).

  So, this is what I want …

  At the end of the book I should travel to your café (all upset because my marriage is over – my face stained with mascara smudges) and then you smile at me (knowingly), wipe my face clean, brush my hair and lead me out to the beach for a walk (because I’ve been travelling for days and I need fresh air). But, would you believe it, Josh is waiting for me on the jetty, standing in the rain. I run up to him cautiously, because I’m not sure what he is going to say to me (can a person run cautiously?) and he tells me he loves me and asks me to marry him - all over again – and I say, ‘Yes, please’ and we kiss and the waves brush across our feet (maybe we need to be on the beach, not on the jetty for the kiss). Having watched the scene from a distance, you meander back into the café and sit on Gethyn’s lap, who’s waiting by the fire, and he smiles up at you and you tell him you’re pregnant (I thought I’d throw that little showstopper in there) and it suddenly stops raining, and Josh and I walk off into the sunset together, and we all live happily ever after.

  The End.

  Author’s Notes:

  Knoydart:

  There is a very special place on the west coast of Scotland called the Knoydart Peninsula. Anyone who has been there will know that my fictional haven, Appledart, is based very closely on Knoydart (let’s face it, Appledart is more or less a carbon copy). I wrote roughly ten thousand words of this novel during my brief stay on the penins
ula, during which time I walked to the hamlet of Airor and visited the Road’s End Café and realised – with great whoops of delight – that it was the perfect location for Aggie’s new home. I’m grateful to the owner for allowing me to (so blatantly) steal Road’s End Cafe for my novel.

  https://en-gb.facebook.com/The-Roads-End-Cafe

  Iraq:

  Although I served with the 1st (UK) Armoured Division in Iraq during the conflict in 2003, Polly and Gethyn are not a representation of either myself, or anyone I met during that time. Polly and Gethyn have their own unique, fictional story. I have, however, drawn on my experiences during the war to add reality to Polly’s experience.